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Saturday, July 21, 2012

I spend a lot of time thinking about the theology of food. (In significant part because the culture I live in is so fucked up about food that if I could address that with healthy theology it would be amazing, heh.)

In Kemetic thought, food is related to a lot of things, but importantly it is etymologically linked to the vital life-energy soul, the ka. Nourishing the ka is one of the things that happens when we make offerings (a bit of offering liturgy is "may your ka be fed"), and so on. Further, as social primates, food and sharing food is part of how we build and support relationships. This is not a small thing to spend some braincycles on.

A week or two ago, I had a sudden comment that - as food is basically a bloodflow of a community - and as we subscribe to a farm share in part because of supporting community farms and so on - that perhaps this process is part of building relationship with the land spirits within a community. And rambling about the way the heavily shipment-oriented food supply kind of distributes the land we can connect to in this particular intimate and intense way, because it's just too big. (I think I was not making enough sense to be either convincing or coherent at the time.)

So of course I'm puttering along with this notion in my head, and reading Orion Foxwood's Faery Teachings a few days later and there's a note in there about how people form relationships with land spirits through eating food that was cultivated on that land. Heh!